There is always some annual event or other happening in Europe, and some of the bigger shindigs can be reason enough alone for visiting a place, some even worth planning your entire trip around. Be warned, though, that if you're intending to visit a place during its annual festival you need to plan well in advance, since accommodation can be booked up months beforehand, especially for the larger, more internationally known events.
Many of the festivals and annual events you'll come across were - and in many cases still are - religion-inspired affairs, centring on a local miracle or saint's day. Easter, certainly, is celebrated throughout Europe, with most verve and ceremony in Catholic and Orthodox Europe, where Easter Sunday or Monday is usually marked with some sort of procession; it's especially enthusiastically celebrated in Greece, where it is more important even than Christmas, though be aware that the Orthodox Church's Easter can in fact fall a week or two either side of the western festival. Earlier in the year, traditionally at the beginning of Lent in February, Carnival is celebrated, most conspicuously (and perhaps most stagily) in Venice, which explodes in a riot of posing and colour to become one of the country's major tourist draws at this time of year. There are smaller, perhaps more authentic carnivals in Viareggio, also in Italy, and in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, most notably in Cologne, Maastricht and tiny Binche in the Ardennes, where you can view some 1500 costumed Gilles or dancers in the streets. Also in Belgium, in mid-Lent, catch if you can the procession of white-clad Blanc Moussis through the streets of Stavelot in the Ardennes - one of Europe's oddest sights. Other religious festivals you might base a trip around include the Festa di San Gennaro three times a year in Naples, when the dried blood of the city's patron saint is supposed to liquefy to prevent disaster befalling the place - it rarely fails; the Ommegang procession through the heart of Brussels city centre to commemorate a medieval miracle; the Heilig Bloed procession in Bruges, when a much-venerated relic of Christ's blood is carried shoulder-high through the town; and, in Italy, the annual procession across Venice's Grand Canal to the church of the Madonna della Salute to recall the deliverance of the city from a seventeenth-century plague. In Morocco and Turkey, where the predominant religion is Islam, and in the Muslim areas of Bulgaria, Ramadan, commemorating the revelation of the Koran to Muhammad, is observed. The most important Muslim festival, it lasts a month, during which time Muslims are supposed to fast from sunrise until sunset - although otherwise, as far as is possible, life carries on as normal.
There are, of course, other, equally long-established events which have a less obvious foundation. One of the best known is the April Feria in Seville, a week's worth of flamenco music and dancing, parades and bullfights, in a frenziedly enthusiastic atmosphere. Also in Spain, for a week in early July, the San Fermín festival in Pamplona is if anything even more famous, its centrepiece - the running of the bulls, along with local macho men, through the streets of the city - drawing tourists from all over the world, though there is much more to the festival than that. Also in July, at the beginning of the month (and again in mid-Aug), the Palio in Siena is perhaps the most spectacular annual event in Italy, a bareback horse race between representatives of the different quarters of the city around the main square, its origins dating back to medieval times. It's a brutal affair, with few rules and a great sense of deeply felt rivalry, and, although there are other Palio events in Italy, it's like no other horse race you'll ever see. At least as big a deal as the Palio and San Fermín is the Munich Oktoberfest, a huge beer festival and fair that goes on throughout the last two weeks in September. Unlike most events of its size in Europe it's less than two hundred years old, but it attracts vast numbers of people to consume gluttonous quantities of beer and food. London's Notting Hill Carnival, held at the end of August, is also a recent phenomenon, a predominantly Black and Caribbean celebration that's become the world's second biggest street carnival after Rio. Other, smaller events include the great Venice Regata Storica, each September, a trial of skill for the city's gondoliers, and the gorgeous annual displays and processions of flowers in the Dutch bulbfield towns in April and May.
Festivals celebrating all or one specific aspect of the arts are held all over Europe throughout the year, though particularly in summer, when the weather is better suited to outdoor events. Of general international arts festivals, the Edinburgh Arts Festival held every August is perhaps the best known and most enjoyable, not to mention one of the most innovative, with a mass of top-notch and fringe events in every medium, from rock to cabaret to modern experimental music, dance and drama. For three weeks every year the whole city is given over to the festival and it's a wonderful time to be around if you don't mind the crowds and have booked somewhere to stay in advance. There is another major general arts festival in Spoleto, the Festival dei Due Mondi, held over two months each summer, which is Italy's leading international arts festival, though on a somewhat smaller scale than Edinburgh, while the midsummer Avignon festival in southern France is slanted towards drama but hosts plenty of other events besides and is again a great time to be in town. Smaller general arts festivals, though still attracting a variety of international names, include the Holland Festival, held in Amsterdam in June; the Flanders Festival, an umbrella title for all sorts of dramatic and musical events held mainly in the medieval buildings of Bruges and Ghent in July and August; and the Dubrovnik Summer Festival, with a host of musical events against the backdrop of the town's beautiful Renaissance centre - though the future of this is as uncertain as that of the country.
As regards more specialist gatherings, the Montreux Jazz Festival in July and the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Hague in mid-July are the continent's premier jazz jamborees, while the same month sees the beginning of the Salzburg Music Festival, perhaps the foremost - if also the most conservative - serious music festival in Europe, though London's Prom season (July - Sept) maintains very high standards at egalitarian prices. Florence's Maggio Musicale is also worth catching, a festival of opera and classical music that runs from late April until early July. Less highbrow musical forms - rock, folk, etc - are celebrated, most conspicuously, at the huge Glastonbury festival in Britain, which - the goodwill of the site's owner permitting - will continue to happen every June; at the Pink Pop Festival, held every June in Geleen near Maastricht in the Netherlands; and the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. Look out also for the Womad get-togethers, a number of which are usually held each year at a variety of sites all over Europe, celebrating world, folk and roots music, and the excellent and still relatively small Cambridge Folk Festival in late July. For films, there is, of course, Cannes, though this is more of an industry affair than anything else, and the Venice and Berlin film festivals, which are more geared to the general public.